Colony (whose presentation is here and slides are here) argued that the “app Internet” is the future in part because of the continuing increase in computing power — both in the cloud, where giant server farms store and process our data, and in the devices we hold in our hands (in the 1990s, according to Forrester, the iPad2 would have been one of the most powerful computers in the world). But bandwidth hasn’t kept up with these changes, said Colony, and therefore the web as we know it has to give way to a world of apps that process and display the data coming from services in the cloud.

[I]f I can’t link in and out of your world, it’s not even close to a replacement for the web. It would be as silly as saying that you don’t need oceans because you have a bathtub. How nice your bathtub is. Try building a continent around it.

Web veteran John Battelle of Federated Media made a similar argument in his response to Colony, saying the app ecosystem has benefits, but that it still doesn’t offer most of the things that he associates with the open web — and if the “app Internet” replaces the web but doesn’t develop those features, then as far as he is concerned the web might as well be dead. Like Winer, the Federated Media founder said that the most important of those features is the fact that the web is based on open standards, so websites can easily interoperate and exchange data. Apps, by contrast, are walled gardens that can only talk to each other if the platform owner allows it.

As some have pointed out, to a certain extent the debate over the web vs. the app ecosystem is a debate over terminology. After all, many apps are simply dedicated web browsers that use web-based standards and technologies to display and manage data — and there’s no question that some apps do this in a way that adds a lot of value for users. Games, for example, can do much more within a native app than they could with HTML5, and so can apps that use a device’s camera or other built-in features — such as Path, which is one of the most beautifully designed apps I’ve ever used.

Ideally, we will wind up with a world that combines the best of apps and the best features of the web — the openness, the lack of proprietary standards and gatekeeper-style platform owners. Perhaps somewhere out there, startup founders and developers are working on just that kind of solution. Like Battelle and Winer, I hope we can get there.